Contents:
I. The ACE League no more?!?
II. BC alum and local activist hired as “Coordinator of Ecological Sustainability Education”
I. ACE League
Check out the below note from SA Throop, current President of ACE League. For those of us who cut our student activist teeth organizing w/ the ACE League, this statement is ill-received. I was involved w/ ACE League when it worked for passage of a BC non-discrimination clause that included sexual orientation, and participated loosely in ACE League during my final two semesters as a BC student. But in all honesty, I found a few of the key personalities in the group to be somewhat “toxic,” creating a very clique-ish and uninviting atmosphere. This atmosphere no doubt contributed to the group’s demise. Alas, student-based organizing often experiences such ebbs and flows, so hopefully ACE League will be revived in some form or another in the future.
From: SA Throop
Sent: Monday, February 20, 2006 9:24 AM
Subject: RE: Some notes on ACE League
(Please feel free to forward this to any mailing lists that might be interested. In fact, I'd appreciate it if you would.)
Hello all. I'd like to inform you of the decisions those attending our discussion last week came to.
After more than ten years of activism and community-building on the Berea College campus, we, the members of ACE League, have determined that our organization as it stands no longer reflects the needs or wants of the community it was created to serve. ACE has also fulfilled its original purpose, that of lobbying for an inclusive non-descrimination compact at Berea College and working towards domestic partner benefits regardless of sexual orientation for faculty and staff.
It is our intention that ACE League be closed on a positive note, that it may be remembered as an organization of great vision and accomplishments. Therefore, we ask to be added to the inactive section of Campus Life's Club and Organization files, effective immediately, 20 February 2006.
This is the letter I submitted to Campus Life this morning. The secondary decision we all came to was that, after ACE is officially closed, we will gather togather on Wednesday, 22 Feb, at 9PM in the Barton Room to work on creating a constitution for the new organization we want to put together, the Berea College Gay-Straight Alliance. To do this, we need your help and input, if you are interested in being a part of this new organization. Also, once we get our feet off the ground, we will create a new mailing list based on those interested and those who attend our meetings, so this one will be disabled. Please let me know if you'd like to be on this new mailing list.
One last thing: to say goodbye to ACE, we are going to have a farewell dinner in March. The planning of this will start at Wednesday's meeting, so come and help out!
II. BC’s new Sustainability Coordinator
Thanks to a pretty sizable corporate (Dupont) grant that BC received to further its sustainability efforts, a new office has been created on campus, the Office of Ecological Sustainability Education. In a pretty widely-anticipated decision, BC alum and former assistant to President Shinn, Tammy Clemons, was hired on a few weeks ago as the new coordinator of this office. The good news is that, in my opinion at least, Tammy is an excellent choice for the position. Aside from solid academic credentials, Tammy has been very actively involved in both BC and community sustainability initiatives for quite some time, including the MERJ Market (http://www.geocities.com/merjmkt/) and the BC Local Foods Initiative (http://www.berea.edu/localfoodinitiative/). I’m currently taking an “Eco-feminism” class w/ Tammy and think she is an ideal choice for the position.
Further, the creation of this office appears to be furthering the initial goals of the SENS Program, which was to integrate sustainability efforts campus-wide rather than simply relegating sustainability to an academic department. With only 3 faculty (albeit very capable faculty), SENS has appeared pretty overwhelmed in recent months just handling the SENS-related coursework and overseeing the Eco-Village. So while the creation of this new office is definitely a positive development, what I’m still in the dark about is its connection (or lack thereof?) to the SENS Program as a whole.
For more information about the Office of Ecological Sustainability Education and Tammy Clemons, check out: http://www.berea.edu/ese.
III. April 2006 SENS Conference
This conference is one of the things that’s keeping me in Berea for an extra few months. I’m working part-time under Richard Olson as the primary conference organizer. I think we’ve got a pretty good agenda put together for the conference, now we just need to make sure people turn up for it. That’s (hopefully) where you come in…
Please share with your networks:
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Campus-Community Partnerships for Sustainability Conference
April 21 - 23, 2006
Berea College
Berea, Kentucky
"Campus – Community Partnerships for Sustainability" will bring together college students, faculty and staff, and townspeople from throughout Kentucky and the surrounding region. In the face of global challenges, colleges and towns can work together to create sustainable local and regional economies and communities. At the conference, presentations and poster sessions will be combined with discussion groups and hands-on workshops to give participants the knowledge, skills, and contacts they need to make their campuses and communities more sustainable. Workshop themes include local food systems, transportation, energy, green buildings and green landscapes, and campus–community curricula, among others.
Speakers include Pat Murphy of "The Community Solution," and Michael Shuman, author of "Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age."
Co-sponsors include Bluegrass Community & Technical College, Centre College, Eastern Kentucky University Environmental Research Institute, Hazard Community & Technical College, Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College, University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Appalachia-Science in the Public Interest, Berea Outpost, Community Farm Alliance, Envision Franklin County, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Kentucky Heartwood, Kentucky Jobs with Justice, Kentucky Sierra Club, Kentucky Solar Partnership, Louisville Peak Oil Group, Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED), Partners for Family Farms, Kentucky Office of Energy Policy, and the Kentucky Dept. of Agriculture.
For further information: www.berea.edu/sens/ccp
E-mail: sens@berea.edu
Phone: 859-985-3593
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IV. SEAC at BC
Last weekend the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) hosted its annual Winter National Council meeting at BC. The meeting was small, reflecting the overall rough shape that SEAC is in at the moment. But it seemed to be a good event, w/ logistics ably managed by Danielle Capillo and the HEAL crew, and a pretty awesome “solidarity panel” including mountain justice activists and a representative from the student-farmworker alliance, among others. For more details about the NC meeting, and to support SEAC financially (the youth-student movement as a whole could really use your $$$ right now, folks), go to: http://www.seac.org/.
V. Governance Conversations at BC
This excerpt is from a recent “Presidents Report” by Larry Shinn:
“Since more than half of Berea's employees are not part of either the College or General Faculties, I thought it important to share the status of current governance discussions in the two faculties that would affect all employees. The current governance system has one group, the College Faculty, who is responsible for most curricular and academic matters. It is made up mostly of teaching faculty and a number of academic and other administrators and staff. The second group, the General Faculty, is made up of all commissioned members of the College Faculty as well as those administrators and staff who are commissioned. Since commissioning is directly connected to who gets to be a member of the General Faculty and commissioning is currently not open to all employees, many employees are excluded from direct participation (whether formal voice or vote) in the current General Faculty. The Executive Council has been working for two years on a set of proposals that are now working their way through the two faculties. The early proposals passed in late 2005 faculty meetings sought to streamline
Berea's committee structure by making adjustments to current standing committees. What is currently before the two faculties are three proposals that would make all employees eligible to serve on committees and/or the General Faculty. To make this possible, the three major governance proposals before the faculties are (1) to end the connection of commissioning to voting in the General Faculty (and to then revisit commissioning as something that would be open to all employees or would end altogether); (2) to alter the voting membership of both the College and General Faculties; and (3) to create a Staff Forum where all staff minus teaching faculty would meet every couple of months to discuss their issues and concerns and/or issues before one of the governance faculties. The Executive Council has asked Diane Kerby and Carolyn Castle to create a trial "Staff Gathering" and invite all employees minus the teaching faculty to attend. That Staff Gathering will occur in early March and the two primary agenda items will be (1) healthcare insurance and other options now under consideration to keep costs low and benefits high; and (2) the usefulness of a staff gathering or forum for those who are not members of one of the two faculties. Please come to that Staff Gathering to make your voice heard in discussions about both healthcare and the governance proposals, including the Staff Forum. People Services will announce the date, time, and location of the Staff Gathering as soon as they have been determined.”
VI. TESTIFY!!
Quote from recent correspondence w/ Jessica Richardson:
“I was reading a news article in the Asheville Citizen-Times this morning about
Mars College, and the student group "GLBT" group was not permitted to become an official school organization because they were fearful of losing money from super-obnoxiously conservative donors, and were unsure because of their Christian association.
I immediately thought about how Berea students struggled to add an amendment saying that people could not be discriminated based on sexual orientation- And if Berea is not a Christian oriented school, I wasn't a student there. So, it made me realize that not only would it be good to remain connected with student organizations at Berea that rock, but also be able to connect student groups with each other when I learn of news like what came from Mars Hill. yeah, so, what can else can I do to get this started?”
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